What the fuck it even means to be a meme?

[Anonymous No.6669501]

What it means to be a meme? Something or someone that is liked by a lot of people? That is frequently quoted? 4chan keeps saying things are memes, but where are they memes? On 4chan.

Why would it be bad for something to be a meme? It makes things more accessible to the mass media.

Just simple bland hipsterism.

[Anonymous No.6669528]

Memes are thoughtless.

[Anonymous No.6669542]

>>6669501
this conversation is too nuanced and meta for 4chan to have an intellectual conversation about. prepare for an influx of memes and no real discussion

[Anonymous No.6669559]

>>6669528
>Ulysses
>thoughtless

good job il/lit/erates

[Anonymous No.6669569]

>>6669501
The 4chan meaning of meme is more or less a sign that has lost most of its original meaning and has turned into a "new sign" with loose connections with the original significance and has now a new meaning which it can express by itself. Bonus points if it can be easily added to with new shit, or if it can interact with other memes.

Like how Stirner has become le spook man, or better, how a picture of Stirner now means that what the image is aimed at is a "spook" (meme in itself, generic falsehood, mental opiate), instead of it meaning Stirner.

[Anonymous No.6669579]

>>6669501
literally everything is a meme, its the same thing as spooks but completely different.

[Anonymous No.6669581]

>>6669569
this. To call something a meme is to insult the person's claim to know such thing just because it became popular, without any deep knowledge about it, not the work itself.

[Anonymous No.6669596]

A meme is an artificial cultural denominator, a mundane piece of thought, image, or sound that spreads out and mutates like a living organism in the petri dish that is the world wide web.

On 4chan the word "meme" has a negative connotation and is now used as a degratory term, it's a collective effort to distance from the mainstream internet culture. It all started when 9gag users started appropriate images that originated on the imageboards

That was my definition of a meme, read up on other dimensions of it here: http://www.amazon.com/Memes-Digital-Culture-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262525437/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

I've got this book in my bookshelve but I can't bring myself to read it as I've got so much more important writings I have to plough through

[Anonymous No.6669621]

It all started with calling certain hip-hop meme rap.
Was used as a way to shame people for liking it, it worked alright.
Then it spread to other things, suddenly there were meme quarter backs, meme foods and meme political parties.
now anything funny/slightly gimmicky is a meme.

[Anonymous No.6669623]

A meme is more or less a unit of culture that replicates. You can think of it as a virus, of which humans are hosts. There are many types of memes. Trendy things are memes, like saying, "bae." In fashion, a certain style of haircut can be a meme. Being a meme says nothing about that thing's actual quality. It only says it is in some sense popular. The meme authors are ones that get much mention. A meme is like a bug that people catch and spread. Places like this are like terminals that allow the meme to spread to many people and rapidly. Most when talking about memes will describe them as if they have desires. Memes want to infect you and want you to spread them. Good memes spread rapidly and to many people, but that doesn't mean the content of the meme is good, nor does it mean it is bad.

[Anonymous No.6670963]

>>6669623
This guy gets it. A lot of other people on /lit/ don't, apparently.